Either sourceforge’s stats are messed up, or the program was downloaded 10,068 times yesterday (up from the usual ~150 a day). Since it says that only 2838 people have downloaded the latest exe, I think it’s a bug.

No promises, but I’ve just read an article on colouring richtextbox text that I might be able to adapt for a certain oft-requested feature. I tried something very similar using the same method, and it looks like I gave up just before I found the answer. If it updates with a good speed everything else is easy; we’ll see…

26 thoughts on “What the”

Ok, the hits seem to be real. Apart from a few .br links, I can’t see where its coming from since they’re linking directly to the sourceforge download (which I obviously don’t have the logs for), and the hits here haven’t changed.

The colour thing? Not so easy. Whoever came up with the RTF file design should be ashamed; it’s terrible.

From profiling the colour stuff on a large image, creating the rtf takes 1.2 seconds and setting the RichTextBox’s rtf takes 21.2 seconds. Even accounting for the overhead from the profiler, it’s not good.

`From profiling the colour stuff on a large image, creating the rtf takes 1.2 seconds and setting the RichTextBox’s rtf takes 21.2 seconds. Even accounting for the overhead from the profiler, it’s not good.’

Any chance you can implement maybe a `go’ or `start’ button rather than instantaneous. It sounds like it may be quicker than existing colour ASCII software.

I thought about that, but it scrollls really slowly and locks the program up while it sets the text. I’ve added a “Save as Colour Text…” menu item which will dump it into a rtf text file, and eventually a html file (when I work out how that should look).

Just quickly dug out JASCIIArt again, and the conversion is actually very quick on my PC (a couple of seconds for a very large image). It’s a real pity it doesn’t automatically account for font character ratios like yours does.

…although, JASCIIart doesn’t display the results inside the software, and the HTML output also takes a while to load up in my browser, so it sounds like it’s an issue that plagues the other freeware alternative.

It’d work out well just having the output. It could fully replace the other software if it also had the feature of preserving and repeating words, colouring the image irrespective of the characters themselves. Anyway, I’m looking forward to it!

It’s now saving to a html file. Problems are that firefox doesn’t display lucidia console correctly (it adds extra space between the lines), while after about 5000 tags ie chokes and stops colouring them. I think I’ll need to try reducing the color depth to 256 or something.

Also I’ll have to find a faster way of searching through a list of Color objects for a Color, it’s too slow at the moment.

While using BK Replace ’em on my results, I inserted tags to each of the charaters (ie. bold [b][/b]) and ran through the results where [/b][b] where and just removed them, so that where the colour/style remains the same between characters the unnecessary tags would be removed.

It’s oddly aesthetically compelling. I don’t think I’ll ever save my documents in the text format again. I’m going to decorate them a little thanks to your software (now that much more complete, although I’d like to see preserved words; just a suggestion, but I’m still interested in having preserved character combinations in double quotation marks in automatic ramp generation, that way one entry ie. [“ASCGEN”] with no other valid characters becomes the repetitive/looped text in colour output… multiple entries becomes variable width, could be curious to see if combinations like ramp [“A””AS””ASC””ASCG””ASCGE””ASCGEN”] work for variable width black and white outputs)! Again, just one of my wacky ideas, probably not what you have in mind.

I’ve thought about that, and it’s certainly doable if I treat everything as a variable width conversion (X = 12, XX = 24 etc). Since it’s all set up for one character, I need to go back and work out how it would have to be changed.

I just added code so that the html output has a black background for inverted images, and it looks much better then the white background does.

With two character combinations, it might still have detail. So three or more character combos would probably be more a matter curiosity and flexibility, and may give you a basic outline while, for instance, keeping the names of all your friends in a generation. Combined with a ramp for detail, words might become rare (except on darker levels) but I think any hidden content inside the image would be amusing in some way.

This might not be related, but I was using a text gradient program called CoolType (fontsuite) on Windows 98 fine. Just started using it on XP, and the last portion in the `alternate colours’ mode text output is black… the colours just drop out, for some reason. It never happened while using it on 98. :/